As energy storage market grows, so does SustainX

SustainX, a company developing a new compressed-air energy storage (CAES) technology, is moving to a larger headquarters with the expectation of a fast-growing market for its offering.

The firm plans to relocate on August 1 from its Lebanon, New Hampshire, facility to a larger, 42,000-square-foot building in Seabrook, New Hampshire. The company was recently named one of the state’s “green launch pad” firms.

“This site move will give us more space to expand and meet demand,” said Thomas Zarrella, president and CEO of SustainX. “The move is part of our continued growth as a utility-scale energy storage company and we see our patented isothermal compressed-air technology being a key part of the future of energy storage.”

One of the problems with CAES has long been heat: when air is compressed to store energy, it heats up, and dissipated heat that’s not recaptured means wasted energy and a loss of efficiency. SustainX claims its technology keeps the air at near-constant temperatures (isothermal) during both compression and expansion, making it more efficient that other systems. And by storing air in standard, off-the-shelf industrial gas cylinders above ground instead of in underground salt domes, as do the world’s two existing CAES operations, SustainX says its approach offers the additional advantages of being both scalable and transportable to wherever energy storage is needed.

The market for energy storage has been growing rapidly as more renewable energy — which, because of its intermittent nature, isn’t always available when demand is highest — comes online. Gaps in energy production are often met today with “peaker” plants that are both costly to operate and burn natural gas or other polluting fuels. SustainX aims to provide an alternative to the peaker plant strategy by enabling wind and solar energy to be stored for later use during peak demand.

Earlier this month, SustainX received an additional US patent for a technology combining cogeneration with isothermal compressed-air energy storage to turn waste into electricity. Another patent has been awarded to the company’s control system for maintaining constant power to and from its energy storage system.